SMX Advanced 2013 Recap: 32 Takeaways

After a successful three-day run, SMX Advanced 2013 has come to an end and, after saying goodbye to the Bell Harbor International Conference Center and spending the night in Sea–Tac Airport, our Bruce Clay live-bloggers have safely returned home.

In case you missed it, today’s post offers a quick-read recap of nine SMX Advanced live-blogging sessions that cover topics from PPC best practices and link acquisition, to content curation, authorship, and Schema.

Google Authorship versus AuthorRank: Google Authorship refers to the system whereby authors can connect themselves to pieces of content by linking content back to their Google+ profiles. AuthorRank, on the other hand, is a more nebulous concept that supposedly uses information gathered through the Authorship program and other signals to attribute a level of authority to a writer’s body of work, which is then used as a ranking factor in the SERPs.

13 percent of SERP top pages have Google Authorship markup but, overall, there has been low adoption of Authorship. Authorship is still in its infancy and understanding of how Authorship signals effect SERP position is something that is still being researched and worked on.

Google+ profiles, pages and communities have PageRank, and their PageRank corresponds not only to the level of Google+ engagement they receive, but also to their backlink profile from sites external to Google+. Using Authorship on authoritative sites builds the search rank power of your profile.

Click-throughs and on-site activity are more important than ever. If a user clicks through to your site and spends 2.5 minutes looking at your article and then clicks the back button, Google will take into consideration their time on site and deliver the searcher more articles from you in future search results.

There are hundreds of Schema objects that can be assigned including reviews, ratings, recipes, and person. Note: Authorship and “person” are not the same. Person is for show hosts and assigns information about the person; Google Authorship uses a rel=author tag and links to the author’s G+ profile.

Only .27 percent of domains are using Schema, but those sites that do use Schema markup have seen 47 percent higher rankings on average.

The idea of typing keywords into a search box is soon going to be outdated. Natural interaction with devices is going to be the new model and technology is catching up.

The keyboard and mouse are on their way out, to be replaced with conversational interfaces for apps and devices. Proactive applications that can infer what you want or are planning to do based on your interactions with technology and search engines are coming.

Younger people are drawn to the accessible spoken-word functionality of Bing. Research is being done to figure out if users want Bing to be like a friend, a butler, or a snarky concierge.

With comScore figures placing Bing at 17+ percent market share, June 2013 has been Bing’s best month ever.

Create good high-quality content and make the content available for others to embed in-full on their websites. For example, people like infographics they can feature on their sites.

Don’t stress about whether or not SEO is becoming inbound marketing. Do your basic SEO.

Make sure to keep your internal link structure updated. Internal link building still works well, and manual link outreach still drives revenue.

In light of Penguin, monitor your inbound anchor-text. Understand how link spam analysis works and make sure anchor text stays brand-focused (as opposed to keyword phrase focused) 50 percent of the time or more.

In this session SEO veterans Bruce Clay, Rae Hoffman, Greg Boser and Alex Bennert answer questions including: How do you deal with syndicated content? If your audience isn’t on Google+, should you spend time on it? When do you know when your job as an SEO is done? What’s the biggest mistake marketers are making? And our personal favorite, if you could make Matt Cutts do anything, what would it be?

Matt Cutts ascends the stage to drop some knowledge. Referring to the paid side of search and keyword data, Matt says that he’s only one guy and can’t push the whole organization. He mentions that he’s really pushing for security and recommends the book Little Brother and says it will inform your thinking on the topic.

The SEOs, Matt Cutts, and Duane Forrester, each share one item they would consider a major conference takeaway. Bruce: fix weak links. Alex: make use of data in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. Greg: concentrate on mobile and consider responsive design that supports native apps. Rae: Avoid being generic at all costs. Matt: make something compelling and optimize the user experience. Duane: think social.

About the Author

Social Media Editor Kristi Kellogg is a journalist, news hound and social (media) butterfly. Her articles appear in newspapers, magazines, across the Internet and in books such as "Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals" and "The Media Relations Guidebook." Head to Kristi's author profile to connect with her on Twitter and Google+.

Agreed, Greg. I attended a session on Google PLAs that I didn’t liveblog but there was a question from an audience member that is relevant to point out here – PPC pros are asking if including Schema markup on ad landing pages could influence Google’s quality evaluation of an advertiser. Makes you think.

Interesting data regarding schema markup since only .37 percent of sites are using it? If site owners are not at least aware of schema they are already way behind. I have been experimenting with it, i.e. the Geo location markup for local and I haven’t been able to determine whether it has had an influence or not. At the same time I know it can be abused since Google does make reference of abusing schema in their guidelines. It is going to be interesting to see the impact has schema markup will have going forward.

This is a great summary….but you missed the most important takeaway from my part of the “Authorship Deep Dive” panel: Google+ profiles, pages, and communities have PageRank, and their PageRank corresponds not only to the level of Google+ engagement they get, but also to their back link profile from sites external to Google+. So using Authorship on authoritative sites builds the search rank power of your profile.

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